


Keep You Like An Oath

by pipistrelle



Series: Necromantic Grad School AU [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Coughing, F/F, Fever, Fluff and Angst, Girls who cannot communicate but are trying, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Past Child Abuse, Pining, Sickfic, They're In Love Your Honor, Trauma, contagion, mentions of vomiting, the defense rests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27018196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Turnabout's fair play in love and war. That means it's probably legal in whatever the fuck Harrow and Gideon are doing. (Or: Gideon gets the necro-flu.)A direct continuation of "The Meaning of the Word".
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Necromantic Grad School AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956787
Comments: 55
Kudos: 269





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct continuation of my other fic, "The Meaning of the Word", and it won't make much sense if you haven't read that first! I only made this separate because that one already felt like its own self-contained story, and this got longer and more complex than I expected.
> 
> Just as a heads up: in here is a brief discussion of how a person with pre-existing conditions might be more susceptible to the effects of a common virus. Also brief discussion of viruses as a topic of study (because I think it's interesting).
> 
> This kind of evolved, but it started as a fill for the prompt "once upon a time". Title from "Uma Thurman" by Fall Out Boy.

Harrowhark was a terrible patient. She chafed at any kind of limitation, especially ones that dared interfere with her work. She viewed self-care as a dangerous weakness of moral fiber afflicting the degenerate modern youth. She thought relaxation was a sin. Gideon learned her opinions on these topics in great detail, because Harrow griped about them constantly. Deprived of her usual spooky skeletal pursuits, she spent all her time and nervous energy brooding on the injustice of her body’s betrayal, and what she would have to do to regain the days she was forced to spend waiting for her stomach and lungs to stop conspiring against her.

But she allowed Gideon to check her temperature at irregular intervals, and she let herself be plied with water and extremely weak tea. She even permitted Gideon to put on one cheesy movie per day. Usually she tried to read through it, but the fever disrupted her powers of laserlike focus, and she ended up staring in fascinated horror at the TV. Or she fell asleep. Gideon had gotten her to watch nearly half of _Ferris Bueller’s Day Off_ , but she slept through _The Godfather_. No accounting for taste.

The thing was, it sort of worked. They were working it out. On the surface almost nothing had changed: Harrow was disdainful, Gideon was cheerfully irreverent, and their relationship, such as it was, hobbled along like a broken-legged skeleton made by a very stupid child necromancer who’d never seen a femur before. But that was the thing about skeletons: in their base state, they didn’t move at all. Any movement was progress.

By Sunday Harrow’s fever had finally broken, and though she was still coughing occasionally, she’d felt enough like herself to apply about half her usual level of eyeliner. “I’m going into the lab tomorrow,” she informed Gideon curtly over Chinese takeout.

Gideon ate another wonton. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Harrow looked mildly scandalized and moderately confused. “I thought you would…object.”

“You’re not in jail, Nonagesimus. As long as you promise not to sweat out all your blood and faint again, you can do whatever you want. And before you promise, know that Sex Pal will be there, and if you _do_ faint then he’ll call me so I can come carry you out over my shoulder, caveman-style. Right through the lobby so absolutely everyone sees.”

Harrow scowled. “How do you know so much about Sextus’ movements?”

“He texted me. He wanted to check if you were alive. And he said he’s going back to the lab tomorrow and under no circumstances should I fight Camilla.”

The scowl had softened to a faintly puzzled crease in her brow. “Why would you fight Camilla?”

“He says she’s bored and wants to fight someone but she’s supposed to still be resting. So I have ignored the three texts she’s already sent me asking to fight. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, I am an excellent cavalier.”

“To _me_ , not to _Sextus_ ,” Harrow snapped. Gideon was about to point out that Harrow had just agreed with Gideon's assessment of herself as an excellent cavalier; but she didn't have to. She watched Harrow flush as she realized it herself, then decided it wasn't worth the energy to recant and plowed ahead. “I will continue to abide by our terms. I can afford to concentrate on mostly theoretical work for this week — I’ll have to, if I’m to have any chance of making up for lost time. At least Sextus is in the same position.”

“Wow, you are such a good friend,” Gideon said.

Harrow ignored her, too involved in reassessing the threat levels of her competitors based on paranoia and imaginary bullshit. “Tridentarius, on the other hand, has had far too much free rein. She's been sending me constant messages offering to _tutor_ me, which is sheer affrontery, but she's only doing it because she knows I can't retaliate. At least not yet. Working with her again is going to be a problem —“

“When is she not a problem?” Gideon asked the room at large. A hot pulse of anger tightened the muscles of her neck and shoulders, as it pretty much always did at the thought of the more arrogant Tridentarius. "I didn't know she was messaging you. Are you texting her back?"

“Griddle,” Harrow sighed. “I don’t want to get into this.”

“Who’s getting into it? You brought her up." Gideon did want to get into it. Gideon always wanted to get into this particular 'it'. The thought of Harrow back in the lab wasn't helping, not when she mentally drew in Ianthe draping herself smugly over the bone centrifuge and taunting Harrow with the week she'd lost. That was exactly the kind of shit that would drive Harrow to push too hard and fuck herself up again, and Ianthe fucking _knew_ that, and would absolutely do it on purpose. "You shouldn’t work with her. She's bad fucking news, Harrow, I _know_ you know that."

Harrow’s mouth twisted into the all-too-familiar first curl of a sneer. "Of course she is. She's a treacherous vulture and a snake, but she has information I need, Griddle. You should know something about — advantageous relationships. As if _you_ don't fall for every implied request from Dulcinea Septimus, no matter how degrading."

That was a low blow, and Harrow knew it. With a bright, brittle, completely fucking fake cheerfulness Gideon said, "Oh yeah, that reminds me! It’s fairly shitty of you to always be so butthurt about me being friends with Dulcie when I was the one who walked in on you and Ianthe playing sudden death tonsil hockey —“

Harrow snapped her chopsticks down on the table as though willing them to explode like a grenade. “That was ten months ago. And, as I have told you a thousand times, it wasn’t personal. The work required certain -- indiscretions.”

"Oh, the _work_!" Gideon echoed, with sarcasm that could have crushed a young elephant in its prime. “Yeah, like it’s really necessary to swap spit with Ianthe to become a Lyctor, that’s a good one! Surprised they don’t put that in the brochure!"

With a frigid finality Harrow said, “I still don’t understand how it _possibly_ concerns you.”

“It doesn’t,” Gideon lied. “I’m just astounded by your terrible taste, that’s all.” Okay, so maybe the newfound depths of their relationship as cavalier and necromancer still contained some pretty rocky ship-destroying shallows. The metaphorical skeleton was still, in fact, pretty fucking poorly constructed, and also for some reason seemed unable to see how objectively horrible and disgusting Ianthe Tridentarius was.

Which was stupid, since she was so completely disgusting that even the thought of her soured Gideon’s appetite. She shoved two-thirds of her dinner into the fridge and stretched. She was getting sore from so much sitting around; she’d have to fight someone soon, even if that someone wasn’t Cam.

“I’m going to bed. Have fun with your skeletons,” she said, and went to her room to lay on her bed and read comic books and definitely not sulk. What did she have to sulk about? Harrow was her old self again, and everything was going to go right back to normal.

\----

Monday was almost cartoonishly terrible. It was an absolute cliché. The gorgeous chill autumnal glory of the weekend had turned into picturesque autumnal freezing rain; Gideon's ten thousand year old car had died and refused to be resurrected, so she had to take the bus; the buses were running late; there were a billion customers and all of them wanted completely obnoxious and unreasonable things. It was so sad that it almost looped right back around to being funny. It would have, except there was an uncomfortable heaviness in Gideon's chest, something like grief that she didn't want to look at too closely, that wouldn't let her laugh.

The only bright spot in the afternoon was Dulcinea, who came in on her crutches a little before three, just as Gideon was working herself up to look forward to the long, wet, frigid journey home. Dulcie seemed to light up from within when she caught sight of Gideon, like she always seemed to. It made the hollows in her cheeks even more pronounced, her eyes even more gaily sparkling, her thin fingers on the crutch grips even more diaphanous. She was sheltered by a hilariously huge green raincoat, and by Pro, who followed a half step behind her with a forest green umbrella. The plastic of her oxygen cannula glittered with a mist of fine droplets, leading like a tow-line to the green-and-silver tank tucked discretely over Pro's shoulder. The whole effect was of an oceangoing ship of the line towed into harbor by a wheezing little steam-powered tug.

Cohort Coffeehouse was a sterile place, all whitewashed walls with gleaming polished machinery, accented in copper and chrome. Gideon would have thought they'd hired her just for the contrast between her clean white apron and the metallic gold of her eyes, if she hadn't also been a fucking amazing barista. By the time Dulcie made it to the front of the line Gideon already had one of the dine-in fancy mugs steaming at her usual counter seat.

Dulcie slid onto the stool eagerly, shucking her coat to reveal a hilariously weather-inappropriate seafoam monstrosity of a blouse, and chirped, "Well, what have you got for me today?"

"Take a sip and find out," Gideon replied with a grin. For the first time all day the heaviness behind her heart lightened a little; and at the same time a slow, twisting sort of pain started deep in her gut. But that happened every time Dulcinea smiled at her, and she could ignore it like a champ by now.

Dulcie cupped both hands around the mug and inhaled deeply, all intent, and only coughed a little dry bark. Gideon wiped her hands and tossed the washcloth over her shoulder, leaning on the counter to watch the ritual. Fuck it, her shift was almost over, her coworkers could live without her for five minutes.

"Apple," Dulcie said airily. "Cinnamon…is that pumpkin as well? Still, nothing all that special." She took a delicate sip, gagged, coughed, and choked until Pro tapped her lightly on the back and she had to expel coffee and mucous into a delicately-laced handkerchief. When she could speak again she gasped, "Good Lord over the River, what do you call this monstrosity?"

"A Corpsuccino," Gideon said, with a broad smile. Dulcie laughed so hard she had to be rescued again by her long-suffering cavalier. "There's cloves in there too, and raspberry, and that green flavor stuff they put in the Radiation Bombs --"

"It's absolutely tragic," Dulcie said in the delighted tones of a girl who had just watched the curtain close on an excellent play. Then she looked at Gideon and her delight softened, grew tender like a new bruise. "But not half as tragic as your face. Why don't you tell me your troubles? You look like you could use a purgative."

"What, me? Nah, I'm good!" Gideon said with a guilty wince that she totally failed to conceal.

"Oh, come on! I get so bored with my own troubles, and Pro's no help at all, he's happy as a lamb in a meadow all the time."

Dulcie's blue gaze was deep and fathomless, which Gideon could have handled; it was the faint ironic quirk of the lips, the raised eyebrow clearly telegraphing _come on now, cut the bullshit_ that undid her.

Fuck, what could she say? It wasn't like there was anything wrong, not really. Harrow was back on her feet and back to the ol' bone grind with her usual ferocity. Things were the same as they'd been for the last six months. Only --

Only Gideon had _kissed_ Harrow (even if it was just on the forehead). She'd kissed Harrow _twice_! And Harrow hadn't rearranged her viscera, which was a huge win, but also hadn't seemed to take it as anything more than her due, which -- fuck, maybe it was. Fealty and duty and all that shit, that was what cavaliers were for, right? What had Gideon really thought was going to change, after all? What did she even _want_ to change?

Whatever it was, clearly it wasn't going to happen. After she'd spent a week crammed in close quarters with her necromancer and had the second-most evisceratingly honest conversation of their entire lives, she still felt like there was an unbridgeable distance of light-years between them. Fuck, why did she _care_? There'd been a time when distance from Harrow was the only thing she'd ever wanted. When had it started to hurt? And when would it stop?

Dulcie was watching her, not impatient, just with a faintly attentive and expectant attitude, as though she were waiting to hear a story she already knew the ending of.

Gideon blew out a breath and turned to fiddling with the shining taps behind the counter. "It's nothing. Just -- Harrow stuff. The usual."

She felt like a worm for saying it, like she was betraying Harrow somehow, but Dulcie didn't react except to say sympathetically, “Necromancers can be such tricky beasts. I should know, I’ve been one for long enough. Is it that she doesn't…appreciate you? Sometimes in the thrill of conquering new heights of theory, it's easy to lose sight of closer things.”

"It's," Gideon started, and had to grip the cloth over her shoulder to keep from touching her lips, where she suddenly felt the heat of Harrow's skin tingling all over again. "Complicated."

"Isn't it just," Dulcie said, and smiled again, gently, almost teasing. "That's what makes it interesting."

\----

It was dark already by the time Gideon sloshed her way up the stairs to the apartment, but this time there was a little welcoming glow spilling out onto the landing from the front door. Shouldering her way in, Gideon found Harrow ensconced in her towers of books at the tiny, rickety kitchen table, leaving the couch politely free for Gideon's use.

"Hi," Gideon said.

Harrow raked Gideon head to toe with a glance. "You're dripping."

"Yeah, it’s raining,” Gideon said, and that seemed to be the end of it. Like swinging a crowbar at a glacier, she added, "Have a nice day at the bone factory?"

"It was not unsatisfactory," Harrow said carefully. This time the glance she darted at Gideon failed to be entirely cool and detached; a little bit of hesitant unsureness had crept in, that gave way to squinty-eyed consideration.

Rather than be dissected like something wriggling under a microscope by that impenetrable black stare, Gideon ducked into her room and peeled off her sopping work whites and underthings to change into a tank and shorts. She shouldered the long bag with her scabbarded sword and jangling collection of knuckle-knives and stepped back out into the living room, braced like a soldier about to make a run across the no-man's-land between the trenches.

She got about halfway across the living room before Harrow raised her head and asked, in a voice that tried for frosty command but landed somewhere a little to the left of it, "Griddle, where are you going?"

"The gym." Gideon's head hurt and her chest felt weird. She had had enough of thinking and enough of feeling and wanted to shut all of that off for an hour. Hitting something unmoving with a long bar of sharpened steel was the best way she knew to do that, and she badly wanted something to settle her nerves.

“You can’t,” Harrow said at once.

Gideon stared. Harrow had never cared much about her comings and goings before. “You know, it’s weird, but I don’t think it’s your decision, actually.”

Harrow stood up, the better to leverage a probing, searching look that suggested she was assigning a use to each one of Gideon's bones -- things like 'paperweight' or 'soup ladle', in the future where she'd managed to separate them from Gideon's useless meat. She said, "You look dreadful."

"Okay, one, fuck you, you've looked like a dead opossum in mascara all week. Two, the gym lets ugly people in, as you'd know if you'd ever been there. Three -- " she couldn't remember what three was supposed to be, but Harrow saved her the embarrassment by blowing out a frustrated breath through her nose and casting her eyes upward as though supplicating the numinous forces of the Locked Tomb for strength.

"That's not -- you look _pale_ , Griddle. And…unfortunately sweaty. And I say this as someone with extensive, recent, unpleasant experience in the subject. Since I don't have time to come retrieve you when you collapse under your arm weights --"

"You wouldn't know an _arm weight_ if it bit you, you barely _have_ arms --"

"-- I am requiring you to stay here. I need your assistance with my Lyctoral studies."

Gideon blinked. That sentence hadn't ended the way she'd expected. "You what?"

"I need you to stay here and help me," Harrow repeated. Her tone was the usual mildly pitying scorn, as though she were addressing someone incredibly dim and unperceptive who also had a head injury, but there was something else underneath it, too. Worry? Was Harrow _worried_ about her? Fuck, she couldn't look that bad, could she? She wasn’t hemorrhaging from any orifices. People hadn't avoided her in the street, or tried to drive her forth with crosses, or anything.

Interpreting her hesitation as budding resistance, Harrow continued frostily, "That is your purpose in being here, and since you were so anxious to play the part of my cavalier --"

"Yeah, okay, fine," Gideon interrupted. "What do you need me to do?"

Acquiescence took the adverse wind out of Harrow's sails, but again there was a weird relief under her annoyance. "Sit down and don’t move."

Gideon sat down on the couch. If she was being deeply, soul-bruisingly honest with herself, she was a little glad to be spared another jaunt into the sleeting slush. Her head was starting to hurt quite badly now, and -- oh, _fuck_.

"Fuck," she said aloud. "You gave me your fragile snowflake flu."

Harrow was doing something with her back to Gideon at the bookshelf full of sagging ancient necromantic tomes, so Gideon couldn't see her face, but she stiffened as though she'd been run through. "I did warn you that you ran the risk of --"

"Yeah, yeah, I remember. Don't get your black lace panties in a twist. It just sucks, that's all." Gideon rested her aching head in her hands.

Then a cold surge of nausea that had nothing to do with the flu drenched her entire body in sweat. She nearly tripped over herself trying to stand, as though she could run out into the rain and do -- something. Anything. "Oh, fuck. Fuck, Harrow, I saw Dulcie today. If she catches this --"

"Sit _down_ ," Harrow barked, and suiting bones to words she formed a pair of skeletal arms out of the bone chips she'd pressed into the stubby legs of the couch. These pulled Gideon's ankles neatly out from under her and deposited her back where she'd started. Harrow said, "Don't work yourself up into a fit. Your precious Dulcinea will be fine. Sextus spent all day nattering about the highly experimental anti-viral wards he fitted her out with, which are the only reason that hulking cavalier of hers is letting her roam about at all. From the model he showed me it's incredibly thanergetically expensive, but the theory's sound."

Gideon relaxed. Good old Palamedes, saving the day again before anyone else had realized it would need saving.

Harrow crossed to the couch with a shallow bowl of cremains in one hand. "Wrists," she said, and when Gideon presented them she dabbed a pinch of the stuff over her pulse points. It was cold and grainy, and stuck to her skin, forming into arcane sigils in response to some unseen motive power, like iron filings in a magnetic field. While Gideon was watching that, Harrow thumbed a great smear of the stuff onto her forehead, then said "Look up," and drew a line of it across her throat, just along the path of a decapitation blow.

"I'd thought Sextus would be in a similar position to myself," Harrow went on, as though Gideon would be at all interested, "but it turns out he spent his week of convalescence doing _experiments_ on his cavalier --"

"Kinky," Gideon said admiringly.

"Don't be crass. _Thanergetic_ experiments."

"Okay, but that's worse. You get how that's worse, right?"

Harrow ignored her. She probably did not get how that was worse. "Trust a psychometrist to waste time and energy looking for thanergy where no one could have any reasonable expectation of finding it. He claims he's working out how to track the thanergetic signature of virus particles, which are not, properly speaking, even alive. It conjures up philosophical questions that might be interesting if they weren't almost completely irrelevant to the actual practice of necromancy."

"You're mad because you feel like he's ahead of you," Gideon translated. "But don't worry, now you've got your very own Petri dish to experiment on. Soon you'll be back to teasing him with cryptic comments about all the spooky secrets you've discovered. Which he does not deserve, because he is a nice person and you are an evil nun."

Harrow did not respond to this, and seemed to draw in on herself a little in some indefinable way. At last she said, "Lay back," and when Gideon obeyed she put a pinch of cremains on the inside of each ankle and the top of each foot. "Now don't move. You shouldn't feel anything -- tell me if you do."

"Yes, my murky sovereign," Gideon said. The bone ash preserved its own coolness instead of warming on her skin, and it felt kind of nice against the ache in her temples. The spots on her wrists and ankles just felt weird, and she had to subdue the urge to brush at them.

"And for God's sake don't talk," Harrow muttered. She had dragged one of their unbalanced bar stools out of the kitchen and perched on it like a gargoyle of ill omen, shoulders hunched and brooding over a book so big that she had to mold a scapula-winged lectern to keep it from snapping her wrists like tiny twigs.

Gideon closed her eyes. She was tired, like the sort of tired she usually only got after days of intense sparring in the cav gym. Still, she didn't feel _that_ bad. Her skin felt a little tingly and oversensitive, but that was probably the effects of Harrow's bone mojo. She, unlike her puny necromancer, had a _great_ body and was also not a whiny little goth scarecrow. She’d be fine, right? She’d definitely be fine.

Harrow seemed to be doing nothing in particular but staring into space, occasionally muttering things like “But what if —“ and “Yes, I see,” and then flipping her book to some other page, and then going back to peering intently at nothing. For all Gideon knew she _was_ looking at nothing, and was putting on the whole delving-into-hidden-knowledge-beyond-mortal-ken performance just to…what? To get Gideon to lay on the couch? She could have clubbed her over the head with a construct femur for that. Wouldn’t have been the first time.

She really had looked worried, before. Would she go to such dramatic lengths to get Gideon to take a nap?

Yes. Yes, was the answer to that question. Gideon had yet to find the dramatic lengths Harrow wouldn’t go to. She had never once gone to normal lengths to do something, not when there were dramatic lengths to be gone. It was not in her nature to leave a portent unpronounced or a spooky catchphrase unturned.

“Harrow,” Gideon said, enjoying the glare she earned for breaking the injunction on talking, “are you worried about me?”

Harrow sighed. “Your obvious lack of anything like normal cognitive capacity would make a blind skeleton fear for your safety. It’s a wonder you’ve lived this long without sticking your fingers in an electrical socket.”

“Just checking.” All correct, no weirdness there.

Gideon relaxed into the deeply uncomfortable couch and decided that a nap sounded just about perfect. With any luck, it would fuck up Harrow’s experiment, too. Win-win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Elldritch on the Discord server, who suggested Corpsuccino as a drink name!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Gideon Does Not Have A Good Time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS in this chapter for past child abuse, probably about canon-typical but transferred to a more real-world setting, which seems to me to be a little worse. Also for nightmares, various flu-related symptoms, etc. And for Feels.

Gideon woke up back in Drearburh.

That was the only possible completed puzzle shape that her brain could make with the handful of chewed-up mismatched pieces it got from her body. She was _freezing_ cold. She was uncomfortably sticky. Every single one of her bones throbbed like a bruise with anger management problems. She knew this feeling intimately; it was the feeling of waking up in some haunted-ass cell in the basement of a haunted-ass crumbling mansion after having had the spit beaten out of her by skeletons.

Only she wasn’t lying on packed dirt or cold stone, but instead on scratchy polyester. And the heavy thing weighing her down wasn’t a cairn of passive-aggressive fibulae; it was a blanket. An actual, honest-to-God blanket. Which was weird.

Then she remembered Harrow, and her whiny necromancer flu. After experiencing it for a whole fifteen seconds, Gideon was ready to give an official verdict: it sucked ass.

Still, it was nice to realize that she wasn’t about to have to defend herself against the unreasonably aggressive undead. Until she opened her eyes and saw _the reanimated skull with its jaw hanging open an inch from her fucking face_.

Gideon’s body knew what to do with a stimulus like that, and it did not involve the luxury of dignity. She yote herself away from that grinning fleshless form with all her strength, which on a normal day would have been very impressive, and still wasn’t that bad honestly, though it resulted in her going tailbone-first over the arm of the couch and knocking over Harrow’s abandoned barstool with an unfortunate _crunch_.

She scrambled to her feet and backed up against the bookshelf. Distance was key; she could hold her own as long as she didn’t let Harrow crowd her. Fuck, where was her sword! In her room. Too far. She stuck one arm behind the bookshelf and pulled out a reinforced baseball bat, which was really just a club that had put on airs. Still shaky but with a little more confidence, she turned to face her decomposed foe.

It did not attack her. It did not chase her. It stood next to the couch and stared at her, grinning the unchanging idiot grin of all skulls. It was unmistakably Harrowhark’s; Gideon would know those little red pinprick eyes anywhere. “Harrow!” she bellowed, or tried to, but her throat was uncomfortably tender and her voice came out less bellow than bluster. “What the fuck is this!”

The skeleton reached for her. Gideon nearly flinched back, then saw it was holding a sheet of paper folded neatly into thirds. She cautiously took it and smoothed it out.

There was no signature, not like she needed one with that cramped, crabby, fussy handwriting:

 _Don’t go anywhere. I have contacted your employer and instructors to inform them that you’re ill. Given the events of the past week, I won’t belabor you with instructions_ (“You literally just did though,” Gideon remarked) _and will instead, against my better judgement and twenty years of experience, rely on your own sense of self-preservation. The construct is testing out a few new autonomous protocols I’ve been working on. It will not harm you._ _Do not break it_ _._ (“Stay of execution, buddy,” Gideon told the skeleton. It grinned at her.) _Try to stay alive until I get back, as finding a new cavalier would be highly inconvenient at this stage_.

Well, that fucking figured. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, always concerned about the return on her investments. “Fuck you too,” Gideon said, mostly rhetorically.

Although, talking investments -- the autonomous skeletons were new, and from all the bitching Harrow did about them, Gideon had gathered they cost like hell to maintain. For Harrow to leave one in the apartment while still having to feed it thanergy from wherever she’d gone— the lab, presumably — was about 5000% more effort than Gideon would have ever expected her to put into a Gideon-related activity that didn’t involve even a little bit of torture.

Or maybe it was psychological torture. Like those movies about people trapped on deserted islands going crazy and eating each other, except one of them didn’t have any meat attached. Or maybe Harrow just really wanted to test her stupid theorems where Sextus or Tridentarius wouldn’t spy on them.

With the adrenaline wearing off, Gideon was starting to feel seriously unwell. Her heart staggered like a geriatric nun covering the last ten yards of a marathon race, and her muscles were giving official notice that, since the crisis was past, they were outie. Her head pounded with the malice and irregularity of a Drearburh bell. Each breath scraping down her gullet was starting to feel studded with razor blades, and she dragged her heavy meat suit into the kitchen for water.

Harrow was right about one thing at least; she didn't need to belabor Gideon with instructions. The routine was muscle memory by now. Temp check (101.2, still better than Harrow, hah!), hydration, try to eat some of the nasty-ass bland crackers, lay down for a nap, get up again and upchuck the crackers, crawl like a gross, achy, shivery slime lizard back into the nest of blankets on the couch, and try as hard as she could to stop being conscious.

No dice. The deep, dark, blessed well of sleep she had dropped into so easily before had dried up. At some point it occurred to her to dig her phone out from between the couch cushions, which was when she found out that it was Tuesday morning, which meant she’d lain down for Harrow’s grit-based examination and slept for nearly sixteen hours. More sleep seemed out of the question at this point. That, Gideon felt, was utter bullshit. What the fuck else was she going to do?

The skeleton continued to sit there and look at her. Its tiny little eyesocket sparks burned into the back of her neck like beams from a pair of magnifying glasses held in the sun by a sadistic child, right before they started to smoke. Gideon decided she wasn't going to wait around to get seared by some kind of exciting new necro-laser, and gathered up an armful of quilt to drag it back into her room.

She'd been curled up miserably on her own bed for about half an hour when a timid knock on the door made her jump. She listened intently, but all she could hear was the skeleton shifting around a little. Maybe it would eat whoever was there? She shoved her head back under her pillow to save herself having to hear the carnage.

The front door opened with an ominous creak, which Harrow had probably spent a lot of time and energy messing with the hinges to get absolutely spine-chillingly perfect.

 _Fuck_ , Gideon thought. Figures that the one day she felt like shit was the day everyone was trying to mess with her. At least her sword-bag was on the floor by the bed this time. She groped around inside until her hand closed on the hilt of her two-hander, which instantly made her feel about 40% better. Still, Harrow would be pissed that someone had gotten through her wards, and if Gideon got blood on her books there'd be hell to pay --

"D'you think she's dead?"

"Uh, you're the necromancer? Try and talk to her ghost?"

"What, just be like, 'hey Gideon's ghost, we brought you muffins but you can't eat them cause you don't have a mouth, sucks to be dead'?"

"Yeah? Isn't that literally what you do _all the time_?"

Gideon hauled herself up and opened the bedroom door, interrupting Jeannemary and Isaac in the middle of the conversation they probably thought was _sotto voce_.

The apartment door stood ajar, the skeleton next to it like some kind of pared-down butler ready to offer refreshments in the form of bat-wing sandwiches and candied eyeballs. Isaac froze in his examination of a stack of Harrow's books, but Jeannemary turned her attention to Gideon with frank interest, one hand tucked into the strap of her messenger bag and the other holding a sensible wicker basket. "Oh hey, Gideon! Glad you're not a ghost. You do look a little bit like shit, though. D'you guys always keep bones everywhere, or is it just for Halloween?"

Gideon blinked and took in the sight of the teenage invasion force, spiky with defiant bone-and-metal jewelry and artistically ripped denim. "There are always bones everywhere. Don't you guys have, like…school, or something?" She was vaguely aware that school was something normal children did. Not that these were exactly normal children, but still.

"Abigail's busy so Magnus is tutoring us today. He sent us over when he heard you were sick." Jeannemary tried to be grieved and embarrassed by this example of adults poking their noses where literally no one had asked them to, but her heart wasn't in it. She was clearly as interested in Gideon's commingled video-game-and-knuckle-knife stash under the TV as Isaac was in Harrow's books. Belatedly she remembered the basket and held it out. "Here. We were just gonna leave it but _Isaac_ wanted to see your necro's stuff --"

"It wasn't me! Your skeleton let us in," Isaac interrupted hastily.

"Not my skeleton," Gideon said automatically as she took the basket. It was warm and smelled amazingly of cinnamon, so strongly that it made her nose run. Inside were half a dozen perfect fluffy muffins, nestled together like jewels in a casket. Gideon couldn't tell if she was nauseous or hungry, and decided judiciously to wait until after the teens left to stuff her face, just in case she didn't like the results.

Then she had a great idea. "Hey, you guys want to fight it? Harrow put some kind of fancy new necro-juice in it." After all, Harrow hadn't told her not to let _other_ people break her precious construct.

"Ew," Isaac said firmly. Jeannemary considered the offer, sizing up the skeleton like a Pomeranian eyeing a German shepherd it thought needed to learn a lesson about who was top dog. She wasn't visibly armed -- unsupervised fourteen-year-olds packing cold steel tended to cause alarm in public, even when they were cavs-in-training -- but her bag clanked when she moved, with what sounded an awful lot like knives.

Isaac glared at her and made frantic hand gestures that meant nothing to Gideon. Jeanne pulled a face at him, but sighed and said mournfully, "No thanks. Magnus said we shouldn't bother you."

Gideon was starting to feel the uncomfortable skin-crawling wooziness of staying too long upright. "Maybe next time," she said, which brightened Jeannemary considerably.

Isaac had returned to the bookshelf, drawn magnetically to the bone-embossed spines guarding the Reverend Daughter's gooiest, most marrowy secrets. "Some of these are really old," he murmured, mostly to himself, running his fingers along them as lovingly as if they were the furry back of a cherished puppy. Gideon had hardly spent any time around Professor Pent, but she could see that Isaac took after his mentor in book-lust at least. He'd probably be needing glasses any day now.

Then he said, "Hang on --" and tugged one out of line, flipping it open to somewhere in the middle. Gideon started forward with a guilty heart -- letting him read them was probably going too far, she didn't want Harrow after him, he was too young and tender to survive -- but he bit down on a giggle, glanced at Gideon, and hastily shoved it back. "Sorry! Sorry. Just thought -- sorry!"

He backpedaled, snagged his cavalier by one sleeve and towed her, mildly protesting, out the door. "Thrash you later!" she called as the skeleton shut it behind them.

The rest of their conversation echoed back up as they clanked (Jeanne) and clicked (Isaac) down the stairs.

"It's so _gross_ \--"

"You don't even know they're really --"

"Uh, yes I do? Abigail has that book! She said she got it after her and Magnus --"

"Yeah, but it's _Abigail_ and _Magnus_ , they're like a billion years old and super weird, Gideon is _cool_ \--"

Gideon's heart swelled, for the first time all day in a way that didn't make her want to die. The basket was still warm in her hands. Tucked between the lining and the wicker was a little white card half-covered in the elegant lettering Gideon had grown used to seeing on her weapons class evaluations, usually saying things like _Well done, really gave em what-for! Might aim for a little less blood next time though_ and _Terrifying enthusiasm!_

This time Magnus had written _Gideon -- this is fourth attempt at a note, last three were vetoed by the messengers. Excuse any brusqueness, am trying to be on my best behavior. Harrowhark said you were under the weather -- here's hoping not six feet under! Don't worry about assignments and such, only get well soon. - Prof. Q_

Gideon sniffled and scrubbed at her eyes and nose with her sleeve, definitely because of the stupid flu and not for any other reasons. She took the basket and, as an afterthought, the book that had grossed out Isaac, and retreated to her room again. She couldn't comfortably stuff her face or investigate Harrow's naughty tomes under the eyes of her tattletale skeleton.

On second thought, she went back out and tossed a sheet over the skeleton's head like a parakeet at naptime. It didn't even move.

The muffins were delicious, even though her nose and throat were so fucked up she couldn't really taste them, and even though they sat in her gut like lead. She had to stop after two of them or risk her stomach climbing out of her mouth to punch her directly in the face, but it was worth it for the warm fuzzy feeling in her chest. She tucked the basket carefully beside her sword for later.

The tome, on the other hand, turned out to be seriously disappointing in the titillation department. Gideon had hoped that Harrow had secretly hidden a porn mag or something in one of her coma-inducing bone books. (Which actually, now that Gideon thought about it, would _totally_ have worked. She resolved to be more vigilant about poking through Harrow's shit when she got the opportunity.) But no, it was a boring old book the same as all the other boring old books, except maybe a little less tattered, like it had only been thumbed through by necromancers in dark dripping caves for a few hundred years instead of half a myriad. 

Gideon arranged herself with her chin on her pillow, since any position other than roadkill-flat made the room start swimming, and propped the book against the wall so she could thumb through it for pictures. Sometimes there were gnarly illustrations of fucked-up bones and organs in Harrow's books. It was cheap-as-shit bottom-shelf entertainment, but it had been all she'd had for the first half of her life, and the TV and all her video games were in the living room with the skeleton. Her head was pounding in a way that would probably make screens unpleasant anyway.

She didn't find pictures of organs. She did find a picture of a huge buff person in flower-embroidered robes wielding sword-and-chain, which was mildly interesting. Then an illustration of a knight in armor with a skull-embossed breastplate, which was pretty metal actually. Then a sort of woodcut of two women, one seated on a throne of femurs and the other kneeling with a sword at her side, heads angled towards each other, lips inches apart. 

Before she could stop herself, her eyes drifted to the scrawled caption underneath. _Medieval European tradition as transcribed by L. Dasuht: ‘When the cavalier shall make oath to her necromancer, she shall be armėd, her head uncovered, and shall say thus: ‘I become your sword from this day forward, in life and death, and unto you shall be true and faithful’; then the necromancer, in accepting the oath, shall kiss her.’_

"Yuck," Gideon said out loud, not entirely convincingly even to her own ears. Her heart kicked in protest and her insides were writhing and twisting with a bright, hot, stuttering cut-open feeling that wasn't quite nausea or pain. Probably from the muffins. Gideon shut the book hastily -- whatever, stupid boring history, who gave a fuck when there were comics she'd read less than fifty times! -- shoved it under her pillow, and curled up again to try to sleep.

\----

And drifted, and dreamed.

She'd been the healthiest living thing in Drearburh her entire life -- even their spiders had been pallid and feeble -- and so she'd never had to deal with half the sniffles or fevers that sickly, saintly, treasured Harrow did. But the virulence and unwholesomeness of Drearburh's carefully cultivated pathogens had occasionally overwhelmed even Gideon's functional immune system. And while a sick Harrow got coddled to the greatest extent of Drearburh's geriatric capability, Gideon had generally been locked away as soon as she'd betrayed any hint of infectious grossness. Not like that was a surprise. Crux had been pretty much always looking for an excuse to lock Gideon away, so he could do whatever horrible soul-curdling things he did when he got a few peaceful hours in the rotting den of filth he called an office.

His favorite receptacle for the trash child had been one of the penitent cells down in the lowest sub-cellar. “Cell” was generous; in reality it had been just a stone box. A barred and shuttered window let in air but not light. Sometimes, laying curled up on the floor, Gideon thought she heard footsteps pass outside; sometimes flesh feet, sometimes bone.

All in all she hadn't spent a lot of time there, but the time she had spent had been marked by physical ick as well as a bloody parade of terrifying dreams. Without any external stimulus, all the nastiness had turned inward and festered. It was part of the being-sick experience, for Gideon. You coughed, you ached, you complained, you closed your eyes and saw things that would have made God scream like a little girl crawling up out of the floor to suck you dry of marrow.

She hadn't had it quite this bad in a while, though. The last time had probably been four years ago, just after her glorious escape. She'd been sixteen, totally alone, exhilarated by her newfound freedom, exposed to the world and its food and its tech and its people and its germs for the first time, the first real time, in her entire life. She'd done a _lot_ of stupid shit, none of which she regretted even for a second. She'd also gotten sick as a dog that first winter and ended up just like this, curled up alone in a tiny shitty one-room rental above a bar, shivering and sweating and hacking her lungs up, with no one to even tell her that medicines existed.

She hadn't really been scared of dying then, though she maybe should have been. No one lasted a week in Drearburh who was scared of dying. She’d had dreams instead of being swallowed by the tomb she'd just escaped, gravestones like teeth crushing her bones. Of Crux dragging her back into the pit while she clawed furrows in the floor that wrenched her arms from their sockets. Of the great-aunts creaking down empty halls, crooning as they came to flay her. And Harrow, stalking towards her with eyes of black murder, pulling her skeleton out of her skin with a laugh like obsidian glass.

This time, the dreams were different.

She was back in Drearburh again, but not in the haunted hallways or the oss or the crypts. There was no Crux, no great-aunts, no congregants except as distant whispers through the walls. She was crammed and locked into the dead silence of her old isolation cell, and nothing was coming for her, and no one knew she was there.

She woke up a few times during the afternoon -- she must have, because she later remembered seeing the light change and slide across the grainy carpet of her room, from cloudy gloom to deeper twilight. Once she thought her phone buzzed like a killer mutant wasp with a personal grudge, but it stopped before she could convince herself to get up and go get it. Once she stumbled to the bathroom because she thought she was about to lose her muffins --thank God, she didn't, so instead she just coughed horrendously for a few minutes and splashed water on her face, then forced her jelly-like legs to stagger back to bed. The skeleton's sheet-draped head didn't even turn to track her.

As soon as she laid down again she slipped back into her cell. It was like a gravity well, the collapsed pinprick of a black hole, always dragging her back. Only this time she knew, in that dream-way that you knew things without reasons, that it wasn't Crux who had the key to unlock the rust-bloody door, it was Harrow. The key to the door was Gideon’s heart, which was why her chest hurt so much. She’d given it up when Harrow asked, but now she knew that Harrow wasn't coming for her. Harrow had gone; gone on ahead, gotten out, become a Lyctor, and had no more use for an idiot whose only qualification was being able to hit whatever she was pointed at. Had no more use for a cavalier who had never been much more than a convenient tool for the Reverend Daughter’s advancement, as valuable as a sturdy knucklebone. And Harrowhark did not cherish sentimentality. She did not keep what was no use to her. Why should she?

Eventually Gideon realized that the wound in her chest was weeping: water colder than ice trickled down from the place just left of her sternum where her heart had been cored out like an apple. Slowly the salt stream of it spread in rivulets and puddles, covering the stone floor of the cell, then rising an inch — two inches — six — and Gideon woke flailing as it drowned her, choked, and coughed. Her throat felt like she'd swallowed a brace of her own knuckle-knives, and she was shivering so hard she was surprised she couldn't hear her bones rattling like a rosary through her flesh, and she was cold with the constant, untouchable ache of spending the night on stone in the darkest pit of winter.

It was so goddamn _quiet_. She could hear the groaning of ancient pipes in the walls, and the settling of insect-gnawed centenarian floorboards, and no breath or movement of any living thing.

God, she felt fucking awful. Closing her eyes again would mean dropping back into that choking water in that empty cell. She half-rolled, half-threw herself out of her bed and managed to inelegantly manhandle her useless body into the living room. The skeleton, draped in a sheet, was standing where she'd left it by the door. Her relief at seeing it was embarrassing, but she didn't have the energy to care. At least it was something human-shaped.

At least it meant that Harrow was out there somewhere, and that she would come back eventually, if only because she didn't waste good bone. She _had_ to come back.

Gideon tugged the sheet off and stared at the skeleton. It stared back. "Fuck you," Gideon told it, half-wildly, and kicked it in the shin with about as much force as a wet noodle hitting concrete, for no real reason except to try to get some kind of reaction out of it, or out of the necromancer who pulled its strings. It didn't work, of course it didn't fucking work. Gideon wrapped the sheet around her shoulders even though it didn't make her a tiny bit warmer, and she sank into a half-curled crouch against the wall. Maybe if she just didn't lie down, she could at least dream about something else.

Time oozed and clotted like old blood. Gideon slid towards sleep and snapped awake again with the whole-body haptic jerk of a gallows drop. The skeleton turned its head once, away from her, apparently to look out the window, then went back to staring at empty space. Gideon wasn't sure if she'd imagined that or not. Fucking hell, how had Harrow gone through this for three days _alone_? Gideon couldn't remember being more miserable in her entire comically miserable life.

And if her upbringing had taught her anything, it was that misery should be shared. She pawed weakly at the tangle of blankets still beside the couch until she unearthed her phone, and — dizzy, desperate, stupid (God, so embarrassingly stupid) — she called Harrow.

She had never called Harrow, not once. And Harrow had never called her. It was not a thing they did. The reasons, as Harrow would have said in her snippy smarter-than-thou voice, were multitudinous. They had been tragically late adopters of phone technology; Gideon had smuggled her first phone into Drearburh at age fourteen and, having no one to call, had only used it for games. Harrow hadn’t owned a phone until she was eighteen, and didn’t trust electronics on principle, as they had no bones and were therefore beyond her power to threaten or control.

But there was more to it than that. “Instant access" and "easy communication” were the antithesis of everything Harrow. She liked to communicate by passive-aggressive notes, or if she was forced to use a phone then she communicated by text: little crafted, bounded messages that she could make perfectly barbed, without accidental slip-up or unintended meaning. Unfiltered conversation was to be avoided whenever possible.

And — when Gideon let herself think about it, which she tried very hard not to do — Gideon had never called Harrow because she was sure, on the lowest mausoleum tier of her soul, that it was no use. That Harrow would never answer.

Well, maybe she’d leave her a shitty message, at least. Maybe she’d just bitch and complain and hack up phlegm for twenty minutes so Harrow could comprehend the joy of the experience Gideon was having —

Harrow answered on the second ring. In a voice so sharp it could have been used for bloodletting, she said, “Gideon?”

Gideon had not actually planned as far as this moment. Her brain was so clogged and foggy that for a good thirty seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say at all.

Harrow’s voice grew tighter and more shrill. “Nav? Answer me.” There was a moment of frantic shuffling. Then, talking herself back down from some sort of brink, Harrow said, “The construct registers good thalergy flow. The wards are unbroken. Why would you —“

Something in there took on a shape of paranoia recognizable to Gideon’s brain. She hacked up something horrible and rasped, “Hang on. The creepy skeleton is a _nanny-cam_?”

Harrow sounded genuinely offended. Like that would even be in the top twenty of creepy shit she’d pulled. “What? No. I don’t get any visual signal from it, it’s more of a thalergy rate-cycle amplifier, but — that’s not important. Gideon. Why did you call me?” More measured, braced, yet hesitantly as a blindfolded spelunker feeling her way along an inch-wide ledge in the dark: “Are you — all right?”

 _No_ , Gideon thought, but she wasn’t brave enough to say it. What she said instead, nonsensically, was, ״It doesn’t talk.”

Harrow's uncharacteristic hesitation gave way to plain bewilderment. “The construct? Of course it doesn’t talk, it hasn’t got vocal cords. Are you delirious, Nav?”

“Dunno,” Gideon said with total honesty. She folded herself more tightly into her sheet and closed her eyes. "What're you working on?"

"I believe you usually call it 'boring bone shit'.” Her tone was dry and bored, like usual, but the dryness and boredom were stretched thin over a hollow, like preserved skin pulled taut over a drum. It didn't matter. Her voice was the most beautiful thing Gideon had ever heard. It was lovely as a chain dangling down into the pit, a black iron chain that she could climb out of the well of Drearburh, out of her cell with the cold water lapping up her sides. Harrow's voice had always been the strongest and most vibrant anchor to reality, impossible to ignore, if only because it was usually followed shortly by skeletons. As long as she’d been alive Harrow’s voice had been Gideon’s call to arms, her clarion bell, the only thing in a rattling, wheezing, mummified world that ever rose above a whisper. Even when it was scornful, even when it was cold. But it wasn't cold or scornful now.

"Tell me," Gideon croaked.

Harrow, like the perverse asshole she had always been, was silent for a long time. Finally she said, "About my work?"

"Yeah. Boring bone shit. Whatever."

Another long pause.

"All right," Harrow said, and then said a lot more that Gideon didn't understand a single blessed word of. She didn't have to. She drifted off again on the tide of Harrow's voice, down into the dark below even Drearburh, past the reach of nuns or bones, past fear and dread, down to the very deepest cavern, where there was a measure of peace.

\----

Clipped, quiet, desperate, Harrow said, “Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake. Griddle, wake up. For the love of — swords, or whatever the hell you love _.”_

“You,” Gideon said thickly. Opening her eyes was like levering the lids off a pair of rusted-shut sarcophagi. From the way her throat and lungs felt, someone had stealthily replaced all the oxygen in the room with battery acid. Then she coughed, and that was much worse.

“Yes, it’s just me,” Harrow agreed. She was there, really there, kneeling on the living room carpet in all her unwelcoming angularity. Her face was very pale under her five metric tons of makeup, which made her eyes blackly luminous. She sounded like she was clinging to this side of panic by a very thin sliver of fingernail. “Don’t go back to sleep. I need you to open your mouth.”

“Tha’s a trap,” Gideon said instantly, with the certainty of decades of experience.

Harrow’s voice grew steadier, which meant her grip on composure was growing even more tenuous. “It’s not a trap. I need to know how high your fever is. I thought I could trust to your sense of self-preservation, but I should have known better. Your brain may already be roasting, and God knows it doesn’t need another reason to malfunction.”

“Mean,” Gideon complained, but this time Harrow gripped her chin with one frigid hand and slipped the thermometer deftly under her tongue. Gideon closed her eyes again until it beeped, then cracked one open. Harrow was still crouched in front of her, looking down at the little plastic stick in her hand like it had murdered her childhood kitten. 

“That bad?”

Harrow looked back at Gideon. Her expression went from distraught to abstracted, as she retreated to some more heavily guarded keep inside her infinite labyrinth of defense mechanisms. “Bad enough,” was all she said. She chewed her lip in thought, smearing away half of the dark lipstick she always painted on. Gideon wanted to lift a hand and smooth out the crease where a hint of pink showed through, but her arm didn’t seem to be answering her brain’s emails anymore.

Harrow changed positions; probably she had left and come back. “Swallow these,” she said, and pressed two small pills into one of Gideon’s hands, and a glass of water into the other. Correctly reading Gideon’s hesitation, she added wearily, “I wouldn’t need to poison you, Griddle, I could smother you with a pillow right now if I wanted. Just take them. Please.”

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Harrow say _please_. Maybe it had never happened before. Maybe she was still dreaming.

She took the pills, though swallowing them felt like eating ball bearings. Taking a sip of water made her realize she was dying of thirst, and she drank the rest, then another glass that Harrow brought her, then another. 

“I don’t understand you,” Harrow said, quietly enough that it probably hadn’t been meant for Gideon’s ears, as she went to work unwinding the sheet from her cavalier’s tangled limbs. “If I become a Lyctor and live a million years, I will never understand you. For a week you breathe down my neck and then I leave you alone for one _day_ and find you like _this_. Even a moron would price their own life more highly than you do. A _skeleton_ cavalier would put more effort into safeguarding itself! An _imbecile_ skeleton!”

There was more, a lot more in the same vein, and Gideon had missed the transition point where Harrow had gone from aggrieved muttering to a full-on Reverend Daughter sacramental verbal flaying. She didn’t care. She let her head roll back against the wall and closed her eyes. She felt pretty ready to die, both physically and spiritually. She’d had, despite incredible odds, a pretty good life -- okay, that was a lie, lots of her life had been shit, but she'd been both extremely hot and extremely cool while living it. She’d kissed Harrow _twice_. If this was how she went out... well, she could think of worse ways. Most of them involving bones.

And besides, the whole time Harrow talked, her hands were on Gideon; first peeling away the sheet, then feeling the pulse in her neck and probing at the underside of Gideon’s jaw for her lymph nodes (which hurt like a _bitch_ ), then finally settling with her cool palms on Gideon’s cheeks, her thumbs with their compulsively bitten-down nails resting over Gideon’s sinuses, just beneath the lacrimal ducts. The left one moved just a little along the lower edge of Gideon’s orbital socket, gentle as a kiss. The fluttery feeling of it sent a shudder through Gideon’s entire body. Probably because her brain was roasting. It was normal for wires to get crossed like that when your brain was a half-charred smoking husk, right? She was pretty sure that was right.

Well. If this _was_ how she was gonna go, might as well make it worthwhile. Gideon held Harrow’s hand to her face and turned into it, pressed her dry lips to Harrow’s wrist, which was a little like smooching a bone construct except softer, and enlivened by a pulse that felt far too frantic.

Harrow bit savagely down on a sound Gideon couldn’t identify, strangled and involuntary. But all she said was, “Griddle. You need to get up.” 

Gideon looked up at her. It was one of the top five injustices of life, behind hot straight girls and world hunger, that Harrowhark Nonagesimus had such a pointy angry little face with a mouth like a scythe and dead stars for eyes, and still managed to be so goddamn beautiful. “Nah. I’m good, thanks,” Gideon rasped. “Seems like a nice place to compost. Make sure you give Jeannemary my knuckle-knives. Cam can have the swords. Don’t do weird shit to my bones.”

Harrow said “What are you —“ and stopped. Then, in a quiet fury the likes of which Gideon had heard before only a few times in her life, she said, “Don’t you _dare_.”

Gideon opened her eyes again in alarm at the familiar click and snap of bone chips being deployed. A pair of skeletons sprang up on either side of her and, bending down, knitted their arms together beneath her knees and shoulders, forming a sort of bone net they used to lift her lightly as an empty sack. They carried her into her own room and settled her into her bed, then crumbled apart as their mistress stalked in on their heels.

Harrow didn’t spare even a glance for her surroundings, though she’d been barred from Gideon’s room for as long as Gideon had had a room. She drew the covers up to Gideon’s shoulders. Then she stood beside the bed for a long heartbeat with her hand half-raised, like someone who had been offered a reliquary containing some small, unutterably priceless artifact that she longed for with all her being but couldn’t quite bring herself to touch.

Only when she finally moved, it was just to run her fingers through Gideon's hair, combing sweaty red clumps back from Gideon's face with careful, deliberate movements. Then she pinched some of the cremains left over from her skeletons and, like she'd done the day before, smeared it over Gideon's forehead. It was gritty and weird but it was also ice-cold, which felt _amazing_.

"Thanks," Gideon croaked, at a total loss for anything else to do or say. "S'ry for crashing your bone party. Don’t be mad."

Harrow said, "You have nothing to apologize for."

Gideon looked up at her and immediately regretted it. Something -- maybe that brief touch -- had wrecked Harrow's composure completely, and her face was no longer any one of the various grave-marble masks that Gideon was used to analyzing for the secrets of what lay beneath. Harrow's face now was raw and absolutely unguarded, a desolation of hope and terror and starving tenderness. Seeing Gideon's eyes on her, she swiftly closed off her expression like a door slammed shut; but it was too late.

Gideon turned away, too exhausted and fuddled to understand what she'd seen, too unsettled to stop thinking about it. "Are you gonna stand there all night?"

"Of course not," Harrow said. As though to make up for her lapse, she sounded high and distant now, much more like herself. Also like a liar.

Gideon felt a hard corner poking out from under her pillow that puzzled her for a second. Then she remembered the book, and before she could think better of it she tugged it out and pushed it into Harrow's hands. "Here. 'S too fucking quiet in here. 'S like the cells."

"Gideon," Harrow said, and this time in her voice was neither coldness nor tenderness, but sheer garden-variety panicked embarrassment. "What are you doing with this?"

Gideon shrugged. Harrow sighed when she realized she wasn't going to get a more expansive answer. Then, uncertainly, "You want me to…read it?"

Another shrug. "If you're gonna just stand there," Gideon croaked, and coughed so horribly that even Harrow drew in a sharp breath through her teeth, universal code for _ouch that hurts_. In a move that was weirdly swift and instinctive, like she’d practiced it a thousand times, Harrow hauled Gideon up by her shoulders to an angle that cleared her airway a little, then eased her back down.

When it was clear that her cavalier was no longer in danger of expiring in a humiliating welter of mucus, Harrow settled herself carefully on the edge of the bed and opened the book to a random page. Something about the sight of her, profile pale and pointed as a crescent moon, head bowed over a heavy book, lips moving and fingertips stained with ash, nagged at a deep memory buried in Gideon’s hindbrain. But she was too tired to exhume it all the way.

In the sepulchral tone she’d once used for services but softer, pitched to fill a consecrated space the size of a shitty bedroom instead of Drearburh's echoing rafters, Harrow began, “Be it ever so saccharinely depicted in poetry and prose, our concern with the relationship between a necromancer and their cavalier remains at its heart our pure ideal…” and Gideon passed out before she reached the end of the sentence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks and shout out to avalencias on tumblr! The woodcut of the fealty kiss is based 100% on her art, which is phenomenal: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/avalencias/623462627428941824. Described and linked here with permission.
> 
> The caption to the woodcut was cannibalized from this site: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/ceremonies_of_homage_and_fealty.htm
> 
> The passage Harrow reads is from the beginning of the "Sermon on Cavaliers and Necromancers" in the GtN ebook bonus content.
> 
> One more chapter! It may take a little longer than this one but it's happening!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains:  
> 1\. Sads  
> 2\. Talking  
> 3\. Smooching
> 
> WARNING for mildly graphic descriptions of people dying by illness in the past. Otherwise it's nothing but exposition and smooches from here on in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lo, it is done! I hope you all enjoy this last chapter, which is the longest and smoochiest yet. Thank you so much to everyone who has commented on this, both here and on the Discord server. Your kind words literally fuel my heart and got this written.

If you had asked Gideon a year ago to describe Harrowhark’s bedside manner, she probably would have laughed for a good five minutes, then come up with something involving thumbscrews (made from actual thumbs!), and maybe a beaker of acid and an eyedropper. And she would have added that anyone who let the Reverend Daughter near them in a vulnerable state was a fucking idiot who deserved what they got.

She would have been wrong. If Harrow wasn’t exactly kind, she did have a gentle, grim efficiency about her as she nudged Gideon awake and made her take more pills, or checked her temperature, or covered her again with the blankets she’d kicked off. The cruelest thing Harrow did to her was make her drink a sort of syrup that tasted like the rotting corpse of a field of wildflowers; but the coughing did subside after that, and she got some actual restful sleep, so Gideon decided to forgive her.

Once Gideon had to roll out of bed and stagger into the bathroom to retch up bile, and though Harrow didn't quite hold her hair back, she did hover in the doorway and, when she was sure Gideon had finished, she ventured in and hauled her up by one arm with a skeleton on her other side. She held Gideon steady while she cleaned her teeth, and then had a pair of skeletons haul her back to bed to keep her from going to sleep on the cool tile. 

And Harrow knew how to handle nightmares. Made sense; she'd had enough of her own. Every time Gideon woke gasping, Harrow was perched on the edge of her bed like an angel on a grave marker, marble-cold and unchanging. Invariably she would grip one of Gideon's hands in a reassuring vise until her heart rate had slowed to merely panicked, and then say in a weary murmur, "Go back to sleep, Griddle. It's all right."

Gideon would be able, then, to go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that whatever hallucinogenic brain-monsters tried to prey on her, not a single one of them was scarier than Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

\----

On what Gideon thought was the third day since she’d called Harrow, she woke up feeling like something that might eventually be sewn back together and resurrected into a human being. The aching in her bones had subsided to a dull roar, and it no longer hurt quite so much to breathe. She was not yet anywhere close to having fun, but she had definitely climbed back above the level of, say, a slime mold that wanted to throw itself into a wood chipper.

Speaking of slime: she was _disgusting_. In a feat of bloody-minded perseverance that should have won her an Olympic medal, she managed to climb out of her gross blanket nest, strip out of her gross sweat-soaked t-shirt, and get herself into the shower. All without seeing or being seen by either Harrow or any lurking bone puppets.

She did fall asleep sitting on the floor of the shower for probably a good five minutes, but she got clean, and she got herself out and got dressed again without fainting, so she awarded herself the medal anyway.

Since the only other option was going back to her bed, which had not gotten clean, Gideon chose to enjoy her triumph on the couch. For the first time in a couple days her head didn't feel like a fragile cage for an enraged wolverine, so she ventured to turn on the TV and was rewarded with a gratifying absence of migraine agony. It was just _Friends_ reruns, because they’d never sprung for the cable package. It was still the best thing she'd seen all week.

She started to shiver again as the water dried on her skin, but Harrow had folded Dulcinea's quilt primly over the back of the couch. Gideon wrapped herself up in it and settled down with a sigh that was almost happy. Her throat still felt like she'd gargled sandpaper and basalt, and she could do with another few days of hibernation, but all in all she was glad not to hate being alive anymore.

She dozed on and off for a while, until the TV laugh track was interrupted by the clack-and-rattle of a bone witch on the move, accompanied by an extremely familiar litany of contemptuous disdain coming up the stairs.

"-- and if you thought I would ever allow you anything of the sort, you're gullible as well as preposterously arrogant -- No. No, I will not --" 

The door swung open. Harrow marched in, then slammed it behind her to vent the extremity of her feelings. Into her phone she said, "Then shove it up your _ass_ , Tridentarius!" and, breathing hard from the exertion of the stairs or from victory, dropped her phone onto the table as though it were the corpse of a rat that had flagrantly insulted her saintly dead mother.

"Holy shit," Gideon said.

Harrow whirled around. The hood of her black raincoat had fallen back, giving Gideon an unobstructed view of the confusion, alarm, and finally heart-stopping relief that crossed her face before she managed to get her expression under control. "Griddle," she said in a voice that was only a little bit strangled.

"I think I'm dreaming," Gideon said. "I hope I'm dreaming, this is an incredible dream. Did you just tell Ianthe to shove it up her ass?"

"She deserved it," Harrow replied, distracted now, as though she’d already forgotten about Ianthe’s crimes. Her eyes hadn't left Gideon's face.

She approached the couch stiffly and pressed the back of her hand to Gideon's forehead, contriving to make the touch totally businesslike and mostly failing. "Well, I suppose that's an improvement," she said. It was in a tone that Gideon had heard her use for her necromantic experiments to describe a change from _execrable_ to merely _grossly inadequate_. It was haughty and high-handed and strove to give away nothing.

That didn't matter. Gideon had had time, drifting half-awake in the twilight between the past and the present, to realize what Harrow's profile bowed over an ancient book had reminded her of.

The Reverend Daughter, Drearburh's messiah, had been tasked with the sacred duty of presiding over the deathbeds of her congregants since she could toddle. Like all her religious duties, she'd taken it incredibly seriously. She had never failed to appear like a cherubic banshee when some prehistorically ancient parishioner seemed to be on the verge of breathing their last. Gideon had stumbled into one of those macabre farces once, when she'd been about twelve, and had noped out so hard that she'd practically broken the sound barrier. But she remembered forever the glimpse she'd caught of Harrowhark, reading prayers from a great mold-spotted hymnal probably bound in human skin, left hand shuttling through a knucklebone rosary, fingers dusted with sacramental bone-ash. Waiting like a vulture for the end.

Gideon knew that the primary killer in Drearburh had been pneumonia, but she'd never thought about it much, except as a general indicator of how much Drearburh sucked. She thought about it now. What had the body count actually been, in the decade or so of Harrow's reign? How many pre-corpses had Harrow sat beside from sundown to sunup, reading useless drivel as she watched one of her people thrash about in the throes of a dreadful final fever until they stopped moving and never moved again? Had there been fifteen? Twenty?

Too many, anyhow. And then to have to sit like that at the side of her helpless, hacking cavalier -- no wonder she'd been so deft at keeping Gideon from untimely suffocation. And no wonder she had the familiar pinched, bleary look of a Harrowhark who hadn't had a decent night's sleep in the last forty-eight hours. It was more obvious close up, from the smears of eyeshadow applied with hands that were very slightly trembling. 

Well, that was all over now. Gideon rose up from the supine like a giant squid breaching the waves, and wrapped her arms round her necromancer as though intending to drag her down to the bottom of the ocean.

Harrow didn't struggle or try to get away, which she very easily could have done by jamming one of her bone earrings into Gideon's flesh and expanding it into a pelvis or something. Instead, she gripped her cavalier's arms like they were the straps of a parachute in freefall and pressed her face shamelessly into the side of Gideon's neck.

"You certainly smell better than you did this morning," she sniped, apparently as a last stab at retaining the upper hand.

Gideon said, "Sorry I scared you, my dismal duchess."

Her terrible secret revealed, Harrow dug her fingers so tightly into Gideon’s biceps that they would probably bruise. 

“You are not forgiven,” she said at last, brusquely. And, with the rote familiarity of someone saying aloud for the first time a mantra she'd been repeating to herself for days, "Your theatrics were unnecessary. There was never any real danger. I’d have taken you to the hospital, if it came to that -- or called Sextus.” She exhaled, her breath tickling Gideon’s ear. “I’m not going to lose you, Griddle.”

"Ain't that the truth. Buckle up, buttercup," Gideon said, and with a heave and yank lifted Harrow entirely off her feet and over the back of the couch. This time Harrow did thrash, and cried "Un _hand_ me! Nav -- " but she was too weak and puny to escape without skeletal aid. Gideon wrangled her onto the comfiest cushion, the one with the least amount of springs digging into it from beneath, and leaned heavily against her with a huge yawn, pinning her in place. "Wow, I am _so_ tired, and you are just so comfy, like a pillow made completely out of bones --"

"Griddle!" Harrow yelped. "What are you _doing_?"

"Taking a nap," Gideon said, and closed her eyes. She threw in a couple extremely fake snores for good measure.

"You are a boor and the worst person in the world," Harrow informed her, obviously not fooled. But she still didn't try to escape, or to dislodge Gideon. After a while she even started fussing with Gideon's hair, smoothing out where it was long enough to be hopelessly tangled, then running the pad of one finger in an obscure pattern over her scalp. Gideon had spent enough time with skulls to guess that Harrow was tracing her suture lines: coronal, sagittal, lambdoid.

If she wasn't careful she really would fall asleep, even resting against her necromancer, who was exactly as comfortable as a cushion made entirely of bones. She gave up the pretense and opened her eyes. "Hey, Harrow?"

The hand in Gideon’s hair grew very still. “Yes?"

"Why do you have a book that made Isaac think we're boning?"

The noise Harrow made in response to _that_ was going in Gideon's good-thoughts jar for a rainy day. "I have no idea what you’re talking about. You are the one with the pornographic reading materials --"

"Yeah, so I thought yours would have to be really good, but it’s just ‘Cavs Through The Ages’ or whatever. So why’d he flip out? Is that, like, some kind of thing —“

Harrow's protest was more like a squawk. “It’s just a book! It’s for research!”

“ _Sexy_ research?” Gideon asked hopefully.

But Harrow was now in full deflection mode. “So it was Tettares who was here -- was the Chatur girl with him? Or was it Professor Quinn? The construct didn't give me enough resolution to tell."

Gideon let her original question go, very reluctantly, in favor of this much less fun line of inquiry. "It was Jeannemary. You said the skeleton wasn't a nanny-cam."

"It wasn't," Harrow sighed, and took her hands away from Gideon's hair, redirecting her energy into tugging at the edges of the quilt, worrying the threads between her fingers until they began to split and fray. Gideon suppressed a surge of disappointment at the loss. Harrow said, "It was a defensive construct. It was supposed to -- protect you."

"From what? Having one single bone-free afternoon?"

Harrow paused her assault on the quilt long enough to pinch the bridge of her nose, as though against a headache. Carefully, picking her words like they were bone chips from a pile of chaff, she said, “It was a problem of parameters. Indiscriminate bone wards were no good; you might have needed help, and a ward that kept out someone you’d called for would be worse than no ward at all. I couldn’t plan for specific exceptions. So I took the opposite approach. The construct was programmed to interfere only with a few people I thought posed the biggest threat to you.”

Classic Nonagesimus paranoia. As if ninjas were going to burst into the crappy ninth-floor apartment of some crappy building and raid it for ramen and cheap booze, slaughtering anyone in their path. “Like who?”

Harrow deliberated for a moment, then said, “Ianthe, or her cavalier. Octakiseron. Dulcinea Septimus.”

“Uuuurgh!” Gideon cried. “Not _again._ What _is_ it with you? This insane jealousy is a seriously fucked-up look -- and what are you even jealous of, anyway?" She lifted one arm in a sweeping gesture encompassing the entire apartment, Gideon’s head practically in Harrow's lap, Gideon’s steel-toed boots by the door all jumbled up with Harrow's tinier ones, Gideon’s leather jackets in the closet interspersed with Harrow's stupid capes. The whole for-better-or-worse, like-it-or-not, eternally interwoven tangle of their lives. She said, "Could I be any _more_ yours, O my dread sovereign?”

"It's not that," Harrow protested. Then, caving under Gideon's glare, she added in a clipped tone, "It's not _just_ that.” She hesitated, then said in a strangely colorless voice, “I suppose it’s time you knew. Griddle, Dulcinea Septimus is using you."

"I don’t want to hear this," Gideon muttered, turning her face to hide the uncomfortable tingling flush that always rose when she thought too hard about Dulcie's deeply kind eyes that looked so ancient sometimes, her hands so frail they were practically X-rays of themselves, her laugh like she'd already seen through all life's bullshit.

Quite calmly, Harrow said, "She -- or, to be precise, someone with her lab codes and accesses -- is trying to steal my research."

Gideon pressed both hands over her eyes with a heartfelt groan. "Oh my God, Harrow, for the millionth time, no one wants to steal your research! No one but you cares that much about bones!"

"It's not just bones," Harrow said impatiently. "And I'm not imagining it. There have been at least six attempts to undermine or sabotage my work this term -- at first I thought the goal was just theft, but recently it seems destruction has also been on the table. My research is incredibly well protected, Griddle. If _I_ were going to sabotage one of my fellow Lyctoral candidates, I wouldn’t bother with the data, except maybe as a diversion. I’d go right for the jugular — for the heart of the matter. The crack, or the place where a crack could be opened, in the load-bearing center of a necromancer’s life." Unnecessarily she added, "Her cavalier.” Then, in a softer voice, "And our relationship shows more cracks than most."

Not that Harrow wouldn't lie for her own petty, jealous purposes -- she totally would -- but probably not so elaborately, and probably not about her precious research, which she had to know was not exactly among Gideon's top ten reasons to get out of the bed in the morning. Gideon racked her brain, trying to remember everything Dulcie had ever said to her. None of it had ever seemed important, not in any way Harrow cared about.

But she had talked about Harrow herself, when Gideon brought her up. _Is it that she doesn't… appreciate you_? But that wasn't deliberate sabotage, that was just Dulcie being a good friend, right? It had to be.

Opening up a crack, Harrow had said. Or looking for one that was already there and trying to drive it a little deeper.

Fuck, she was going to end up as paranoid as her necromancer. “But Dulcie never talks to me about bones,” she said, stupefied. “That’s like, top reasons two through six that I hang out with her.”

“No, I imagine she doesn't." Harrow had started picking at the quilt again, this time with just a little bit more vindictive force behind her movements as she tugged out loose threads. "If she shows her hand too early she'll ruin the whole game. And if my guesses are right, she’s clever enough to wait until she has you as thoroughly entangled as she can. She probably won't ask you about my work directly -- she must know it's not your area. More likely she'll get you to bring her somewhere or show her something of mine, that she can use to get through my defenses."

This was all said quite matter-of-factly, as though Harrow were relaying the plot of a movie she'd already seen. While Gideon was still reeling from that, trying to figure out if anything she'd ever said or done could possibly be used as some kind of kryptonite against her adept, Harrow added darkly, “I didn’t want her — sniffing around you while you were vulnerable.”

"Yikes," Gideon said. It was all she could think of. This was going to take a hell of a lot of processing. What could she possibly say when she saw Dulcie next? _My necromancer thinks you're conducting some sort of shady sting operation on my heart, but she also sometimes thinks takeout deliverypeople are trying to kill her by putting spices in her food. She's definitely wrong, right?_ "Fuck, Harrow, why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I wasn't sure of my conclusions," Harrow admitted. "And I wasn't sure how you'd react. There have been times when I thought you might pick her side over mine, especially if I forced the issue too soon.” Again that hesitation. She’d been so damn _careful_ lately. She hadn’t been like that before the pool. Now she held herself stiff and cautious like she was surrounded on all sides by sheets of glass that would shatter if she breathed on them. Like all of the sudden she thought Gideon was so fucking _breakable_. 

As if to prove Gideon’s point she said, “I didn't want to -- upset your equilibrium."

"Okay, well, you fucking failed," Gideon retorted. "And just so we're clear, you are _also_ totally jealous of Dulcie spending time with me, research-shmesearch.” Gideon paused as a horrible thought occurred to her. “Shit, I'm gonna be honest, I'm kinda surprised you never ensorcelled my jaw so I _couldn’t_ talk to her.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Harrow admitted, which was so goddamn typical. But then she added, with an unexpected fierceness, “But if I’ve treated you in such a way that you yearn to betray me, then I’ve learned nothing and don’t deserve the degree.”

The Harrowhark of Drearburh would have never even had such a crawling, cringing, sentimental thought. The Harrowhark of a year ago would have choked on it before she'd let it pass her lips. The Harrowhark of now wouldn't look at Gideon; she kept her eyes resolutely on her hands, which had moved from the quilt and were now picking at imperfections in the upholstery itself. At least she wasn't biting her nails (yet).

"Don't worry. You'll get the degree," Gideon said, trying to ignore the way her insides clenched and twisted, trying to not think about the day when Harrow was handed her diploma (probably carved on a bone) and moved on to bigger things. "I won't fuck it up for you. It would suck to have to start over with another cavalier.”

Harrow looked at her as though she’d begun reciting necromantic theorems in Welsh.

Involuntarily Gideon croaked, “What?”

“I thought you understood,” Harrow said, sounding suddenly very tired. “I thought you knew -- but then, if you had, Septimus might never have gotten a foothold with you at all. I can see that now. Let me then speak plainly: Griddle, my heart is a narrow grave, with space in it for exactly one person. That place has been yours since we were children.”

Gideon said, “ _What?_ ”

“I will never have another cavalier. I very much doubt I will ever love another living creature. If I have acquired ‘friends’, it is by your doing.” She said ‘friends’ as though it were a scorpion that would sting unless carefully handled.

Gideon’s brain was grinding gears together through a pall of oily black engine smoke. “I think we should go to the hospital actually. Right now."

Harrow betrayed a flicker of alarm. "What?"

"I'm having a seizure. Or maybe a stroke. I just heard you say that you _love me_. With your mouth. I think something's really wrong.”

Now Harrow was back to being cross. "Griddle, stop joking --"

"Bold of you to assume I'm joking." Gideon's palms were sweating. Gideon's everything was sweating. She was pretty sure her soul was about to eject itself from her body in a deeply unpleasant way, though it was a gamble whether it would happen before her heart burst like an overripe grape.

Harrow rested a hand on Gideon’s fevered brow. It was like a snowman’s hand, made of a bundle of frozen twigs. Maybe she did something bone-witchy too, because Gideon’s panic sort of paused, like a roller-coaster car thrown by a faulty switch into a state of terminal suspense at the top of a very long plunge.

“Gideon. You _kissed_ me,” Harrow said.

A glimmer of relief flickered in the distance. “Oh God, Harrow, that’s not what real kissing is. See, when two hot girls lust each other very much —“

“Shut up,” Harrow said, with a great deal of effort, as though each word were trapped underneath a boulder that had to be rolled away. “Listen, for once in your life. I need you to understand. In that pool I told you the most vile secrets of my existence. I showed you the fetid pit of me. And then you kissed me --"

"And you didn't care!" Gideon burst out. "You didn't -- I thought -- if you wanted, we could have --" Okay, yes, that would have been a scene straight out of a terrible porno, but it didn't have to be like that, it could have been just her and Harrow, like it had always been her and Harrow, only with the charge that had been building between them their entire lives finally grounded. The world could have finally made _sense_. But Harrow had climbed out of the pool, eyes black as death, clothes dripping, and swept away like she'd been late to collect some poor bastard's soul and shepherd it off this mortal coil.

The heartbreak and the longing that had never fully faded, but only drawn back like low tide, broke against Gideon's sternum like a tidal wave breaking on a rocky coast. And the riptide pulled her under. She said, hoarse and hurting, "I kissed you and you didn't say _anything_. Nothing really changed."

It had been the ultimate proof. That the glances she'd thought she'd caught Harrow out in, the brief, prickly brushes of Harrow's hand against her arm or the back of her neck, the ferocious protective fury Harrow had vented on anyone who seemed to mean Gideon harm -- that none of them had meant what she'd hoped, so deep down that she hadn't even really let herself hope. And then that hope had died, and she had _let it die_ , she had resigned herself, she had sealed the coffin and shoveled the dirt over its grave and decided to _move on_. 

Only its death had, apparently, been greatly exaggerated.

"Everything changed," Harrowhark said.

"Bull _shit_."

Harrow was looking at her now. Her face was eerily empty. She said, "I couldn't -- reciprocate. I _couldn't_. I can't."

Then Gideon felt like a wretched brute and a gigantic asshole. “Oh, God, Harrow, I didn't mean -- if you don't, or you're not -- if that's not what you want, I don't have the right to --" She started to push herself up, away from her necromancer. God, what if she was just enough of a colossal idiot to have misread the whole last year? To have flattered herself that Harrow might feel a way about her cavalier that she'd never, as far as Gideon knew, felt about anyone _ever_ , and then to throw that in her face like a demand --

She was still a little too woozy to make it all the way to vertical, but she was damn well going to try, except Harrow said " _Gideon_ ," in a desperate pleading voice that locked her joints and froze her in place as surely as bone magic ever could have.

“Our whole lives,” Harrow continued doggedly, “I have controlled you. Manipulated you. If I wanted something you had, I took it. Even if I didn’t want it, I took whatever you had away from you, just to make you as miserable as I was. This thing, this _one_ thing, I cannot _take,_ Griddle. If I did, it would destroy us both.”

Well, that was just stupid. "You didn't take it," Gideon protested. "I'm giving it to you."

Harrow did not seem comforted by this. "Your priorities are distressingly unbalanced -- as the last few days have proved." She was fidgeting, stumbling over her words, leaving gaps unfilled, her usual sharp and ready wit dried up. "It didn’t make _sense_ as a -- as a romantic gesture. Not towards _me_. I had to be sure that you weren't just caught up in the moment. Or seeing something -- else. In the duty between necromancer and cavalier. Something I didn't understand, or was misinterpreting --"

"Oh, my God. That book," Gideon said suddenly. "It's all about cavs and necros in _love_. You were researching whether you're allowed to make out with your cav. Or whether cavs just sometimes kiss their necros, you know, casually, on the forehead, _underwater in the middle of the night,_ and then _do it again a week later_ for _no reason_ \--"

"I was researching the origin and evolution of the oath," Harrow corrected her. She had the grace to sound uncertain, if not actually embarrassed. “And the bounds of...acceptable behavior.”

“Yeah? And what did your book say? Did you make a graph?”

Harrow's uncertainty had become defensive, which meant a frown was beginning to crease the spot between her brows and she was wringing her left wrist with her right hand, as though she would find an answer there squashed down between the radius and ulna if she could just work it loose. "I've taken so much from you. Your childhood, your future. The last thing I deserve is -- affection. I had to be sure --"

"Be sure now," Gideon said. She hauled herself the rest of the way upright, ignored the rush of dizziness, and turned to face the infuriating, obstinate, fucked-up, brilliant walking paleontology exhibit who had somehow always been the load-bearing center of her life, and was looking at her now with an expression halfway between indignation and panic. "God, you are so stupid. For the smartest bone nerd alive --"

"Griddle --"

"You are _so dumb_! I can't _believe_ how completely brainless you are. You aren't allowed to make jokes about my brain function anymore."

"If there is a point to this --"

"You don’t always have to _take_ , Harrow."

Emptily she said, "I don't know if I'm capable of anything else."

"Of course you are, you bozo! You could just _ask_. And," she added as an afterthought, "you could _trust me_ to know what I'm giving you. Because it’s _everything_. It’s always been everything."

There was a horrible pause. Harrow's eyes were black as the proverbial night just before the dawn, except Gideon hoped that dawn never came. She momentarily lost brain function as Harrow’s lips parted, her gaze finding the infuriatingly imperfect divot near the philtrum as inevitably as falling down a well. Harrow said, very softly, "You’ve given me everything. What do _you_ want, Gideon?"

Well, there was her bluff _resoundingly_ called! Point to Harrowhark Nonagesimus!

Gideon shifted a little closer to her, trying not to expire in a fit of sheer idiot panic. This was it, this was _real_. No retreat, no misunderstanding. No more bet-hedging forehead kisses; it was time to put her two-hander where her mouth was. Or put her hands where her mouth wanted to be. Or, fuck, hang on --

Harrow was looking at her with the serenity of someone who had completely given up on predicting what was going to happen in the next thirty seconds. She was...

She was just Harrow. Small and haughty, bony inside and out, angry and perverse and complicated and more stubborn than could possibly be good for anyone. So uptight that her desires had probably crystallized into diamond in the tectonic heat and pressure of her soul. So repressed that she'd gone and gotten a book out of the library to try to find out if kissing your adept on the forehead in a pool was a normal thing to do, and then had gone to absurd lengths to hide the fact that she was even still thinking about that, leaving her cavalier to flounder in the silence rather than risk taking what she had not been given. She was insufferable. She was the only person Gideon was really sure she'd ever loved.

Gideon licked her own lips, which were bone-dry. Very carefully, she lifted a hand to Harrow's sharp chin, traced her thumb from the point upward along her jawbone, ended by cupping her cheek in one hand. They were very close together now, almost as close as the drawing Gideon had seen of the necromancer and cavalier in Harrow's stupid love book. _And the necromancer, in accepting the oath, shall kiss her_.

"Can I --?" Gideon started, but before she could get all the way there Harrow rose onto her knees (which Gideon filed away to laugh about later) and, one arm around Gideon's neck for balance, pressed a kiss like a burning brand to the corner of her mouth. And _pulled away again,_ one hand firmly on Gideon's chest to stop her following.

Gideon’s soul tried to leave her body for like the fifth time in the last ten minutes. She made a deeply unfortunate sound in the general vicinity of “dying whale”, which was an accurate expression of the very unsexy desolation in her heart. "That was weak as hell, Nonagesimus," she complained with the one brain cell that was neither on fire with longing nor obliterated by crushing disappointment. "Even you have more game than that. A dead salmon has more game than that!"

Exasperated, Harrow said, "This is what I meant about priorities. You're still not well, Griddle."

"I feel fine!" Gideon lied. She felt like her body and brain were on very different paths in life and were about to have a serious talk about the state of their relationship. For fuck’s sake, she was still half-wrapped up in Dulcinea’s quilt because she’d get all pathetically shivery without it. Maybe a dead salmon had more game than _her_.

Harrow was utterly unmoved. "You still have a fever." She copied the path on Gideon’s face that Gideon had just traced on hers, pad of the thumb from Gideon’s chin to the edge of her lower lip. “We’ll have time when you’re feeling better.”

"I hate you," Gideon said helplessly. “I am _stupid_ in love with you. You know that, right?”

Harrow smiled. It was a small smile, darkly ironic, hinting at greater mysteries than had yet been unearthed by any mortal soul. It went through Gideon like an iron spike and stuck fast in her heart so that there would be no getting free of it. It didn't need words.

Gideon groaned and fell forward as though shot, landing mostly in Harrow's lap. At least Harrow had the decency to start stroking her hair again, and rested one cool hand possessively between her shoulderblades. "You owe me, Nonagesimus," Gideon said into her bony knees. "You owe me _with interest_."

"I am in your debt," Harrow agreed. "Ever and always. My cavalier.”

\----

A sudden gust of wind carried in the smell of rain and rotting leaf-litter, threading a crisp, chill note through the tang of sweat and floor polish that always filled the cav gym. A change in the light told Gideon the outside doors had opened somewhere on the upper balcony that ringed the fencing floor. 

She ducked a savage chop from Camilla's left-hand sword, brought her two-hander up and, in a move that made her burn with pride, caught _both_ the curved blades for just a second, long enough to throw Cam back a few paces. Then Gideon lowered her own sword, panting, and turned around to wave. 

Harrowhark leaned against the balcony railing, frowning down at her like a grumpy thundercloud. She did not wave back, but Gideon thought she saw Harrow's scowl lighten a little, even at this distance.

"You're meant to _disengage_ when you want to stop. Someone who isn't as nice as me could have hacked your arms off," Camilla said from behind her. Quietly aggrieved, as usual, by Gideon's complete lack of professionalism or dedication. But Gideon turned and caught Cam eyeing her own necromancer, who had trailed Harrow in from the wet outside and was apparently trying to engage her in a friendly argument, without much success.

"Thanks for being nice, then." Gideon punched Cam's shoulder and grinned at her long-suffering sigh. Then she shouldered her sword and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time until she burst out onto the upper floor. Harrow barely had time to turn before Gideon caught her up with her free arm and squeezed her until she squeaked. "How are you, my caliginous captain?"

"Ugh," Harrow said, but instead of fighting for distance she very subtly leaned into Gideon's embrace, so slightly that not even Palamedes would have seen it. If he had been looking, which he wasn't. He'd politely fixed his arresting gray gaze on something incredibly interesting on the railing under his hand -- or maybe he was having one of those wordless near-telepathic conversations with his cavalier on the floor below.

With no eyes on her and complete free rein, Gideon buried her nose in Harrow's hair, inhaling the intermingled scents of incense, bone-dust and black coffee that meant she'd been working. Seeing as Gideon had woken up this morning to an empty bed, she’d probably been in the lab since before sunrise. (They used Gideon's bed, since Harrow's was a) too small and b) mostly bones. They were going to have to get a bigger mattress as soon as Gideon’s next paycheck came in.)

"Nav, we have a lecture," Harrow sighed into Gideon's pecs. Gideon stole a tiny smooch, just a brief brush of her lips against Harrow's temple, and revelled in the black-glass glare it earned her as she set her necromancer down.

"Gimme a sec, I'll be right back," she said, and jogged down the hall to grab her stuff. She felt good -- like, _really_ good. At the peak of the fight she'd still noticed the few last traces of lingering exhaustion, like moving through a veil of cobwebs, but getting to _move_ again was sheer joy. And now, with her whole body singing with adrenaline and deliciously heavy with the good kind of ache that you only got from hitting stuff really hard, she got to go sit for a whole hour in some lecture hall across campus and find the most fun way of distracting Harrow from her notes. This day really could not get much better.

She had changed and had her sword back in its bag slung over her shoulder when the locker room door slid open. Gideon heard the click and turned to see Harrow pulling it shut behind her.

The look on her face made Gideon flush, as though Harrow had walked in completely naked. The strap of the bag slipped off Gideon's shoulder and she didn't even try to reach for it. "Harrow, what --"

"I owe you a debt," Harrow said, and her voice was remarkably even, but not quite as even as she probably wanted it to be. She drifted across the soft white linoleum like a shadow. Gideon suddenly couldn’t breathe. They'd been cuddling almost nonstop for days, how was she suddenly so aware of every inch of chilly space between them? 

Then there was no space. Harrow was pressed up against her, sensuous as a goddamn scarecrow, which should _not have worked_ , but it _did_ , fuck, it always did, because Gideon was _insane_. Gideon was insane and also about to vibrate out of her skin. Harrow had a hand clenched in Gideon’s shirt just at the neckline. She said, "Are you sure this is what you want?"

"Are you trying," Gideon said, "to fucking _murder me_ ," but then Harrow's eyes flashed like a storm churning the surface of the sea by night, and she kissed Gideon the way she'd once flung her skeletons into battle. Ruthless, confident, as though she had never once heard of the concept of taking prisoners. It was not even _remotely_ like the slow, sensual, exploratory lip-lock between Harrow and Ianthe that Gideon had walked in on at a New Year's party ten months ago. Ninety percent of her brain regretted how indelibly that sight was seared into her memory. The other ten percent had thought _huh, so that's what it would be like to kiss Harrow_.

It was not. It was not at all. Gideon felt in imminent danger of being devoured; but after all, this was Harrow, and she'd pushed back against Harrow's pull, taken what Harrow gave and returned it, for as long as she could remember. She got one hand into the folds of Harrow's black sweater for purchase, slid the other from Harrow's face into her hair, still a little damp with rain. She tasted like rain, and like ridiculous amounts of deoxygenated violet lipstick, and overpoweringly like coffee with the faintest tang of blood. Harrow had both arms locked around Gideon's neck, the sweetest noose imaginable. Her lips were chapped but very warm, her tongue was a goddamn revelation. Turned out that all it took to make Gideon religious was the Reverend Daughter's tongue in her mouth, should have tried that ages ago --

The hard wooden edge of a bench hit the back of Gideon's knees and something metal jabbed her in the base of the spine. One of Harrow's hot little hands had slipped under the hem of her t-shirt and was trailing up the heaving bellow of her ribs. Which would have been easier to do five minutes ago when she'd still been in just a tank and sports bra, but Harrow wouldn't have been Harrow if she did anything the easy way. 

Harrow sucked at Gideon’s bottom lip and the world whited out for a heartbeat. _Fuck_. Cam would definitely be coming down the hall in another minute, this was going to get really awkward really fast, and Gideon absolutely did not care.

Harrow finally broke them apart. She was wildly flushed, and breathing like she was the one who’d just spent an hour on the fencing floor. Gideon was close enough to be able to see the almost-invisible line between her dilated black pupils and her black irises, which maybe no one else in the world could have noticed. Talk about sacred secrets. 

With the kind of wobbling, concussed uncertainty that Gideon had only seen the one time she’d gotten her necromancer drunk, Harrow asked, “Was that…?”

Gideon’s mouth kind of spasmed for a few seconds until the neurons that controlled her lips and tongue reconnected to the rest of her brain. “If you want me to answer that, we are definitely going to miss lecture.”

“I’ve already done the reading,” Harrow said, which was a sentence that Gideon would have sworn was absolutely impossible to make sexy if you’d asked her five minutes ago.

Camilla cleared her throat from the doorway. “Hate to interrupt,” she said blandly, blatantly interrupting, “but I do need to get to that locker you’re leaning on.”

Harrow scrambled to put space between herself and her cavalier, like that would un-muss either of their hair or un-smear the dark lipstick from around Gideon’s mouth. “Shit. Sorry,” Gideon said, stumbling away from the handle with Cam’s intimidatingly sturdy gray padlock on it that had been jabbing into her lower back for the past thirty seconds. “Hey, good match today,” Gideon said chummily, ignoring Harrow’s frantic attempts to get her out of the room, first by stern facial expressions, then by actually tugging on her. “Same time tomorrow?”

“If you’re not otherwise occupied,” Cam drawled as she gathered her things. But Gideon knew she was happy for them, deep down. Way, way deep down. 

“We have a lecture,” Harrow said at last, impressively brisk and businesslike, giving up on her own cavalier to address Camilla directly. “Hect.”

Cam inclined her head and, Gideon would have sworn on her thumb bones, very _nearly_ smiled. “Nonagesimus.”

Gideon allowed herself to be towed away, so lost in bliss that she didn’t notice they were going the wrong way until Harrow shoved her into an elevator. “Hey,” she said, then rethought her protest. Elevators could be interesting.

But Harrow was on a mission now. She jabbed the floor button like it had personally wounded her. “We’ll take the lobby exit. If we’d gone the other way we would have had to pass Sextus.”

“Cam’s just going to tell him what happened,” Gideon pointed out. “Like, immediately.”

“That’s not the _point_ , Griddle.”

Far be it from Gideon to guess what the point could possibly be. Good thing she did not give a shit. What she did give a shit about was kissing Harrow again, so she did that until the elevator doors opened and Harrow ducked out of her embrace with a breathless huff of mingled disgust and delight. 

The lobby of the building was empty, dim and echoing in the low gray afternoon. Harrow let Gideon take her arm, and they walked out into the wind and storm together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (*deep breath* okay, so about the necessary levelling out of Gideon and Harrow's power dynamic --)
> 
> Fun fact that I only realized at the end: each chapter has 3 sections, which means the whole fic has 9! The layers abound.
> 
> Again, thank you all, I couldn't have written this without the encouragement and support of all of you. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Elldritch on the discord server, who suggested "Corpsuccino" as a drink name.


End file.
